Things That Still Mystify Me

[MoniputerLM]

#2 is such an inconvenience that I'm debating if I should switch to using my garage clicker or start backing into the garage.

I wish home link would just pop up the moment I change from reverse to drive.

I have used the garage "clicker" for a year now, but only in the Lucid.

 

[doon]

As per thread title
My wife

Yes that. And where the white goes when the snow melts.

 

[ebr]

I was just coming to post a rant on some of this myself. I've had my Air GT for almost a week and I absolutely love it. It is an incredible driving machine. But some of these UI things mystify me as well as they just seem so fundamental and such a huge miss by a design team that seems to have thought about every single detail and come up with elegant and beautiful solutions to most of them.

I can't remember owning a car since the inception of "infotainment" systems that had absolutely no way to display the currently playing song anywhere other than on the actual media player screen. They ALL have that information somewhere all the time.

I don't completely buy the Android Automotive limitation either because they recently put turn by turn in that spot that otherwise shows the word "Air" all the time. As shown in those early promo pics, this space should be used for the current song.

And let's talk about the "Home" screen. This one makes me want to enter it in ESPN's "c'mon man...". Do the UX engineers really think that I'm so addled that the primary thing I will need to do each time I get in my car is have it tell me exactly how to find my own house or place of work? These are the things that should take up 50% of the home screen space? And then let's fill most of the rest of it with a Tidal display whether I'm using Tidal or not - oh, but if I do happen to be playing Tidal at the time, let's not show that, let's just keep it as a static display of the last several Tidal stations selected.

C'mon man...

As I said, I really love this car and, now that I finally got it up to date on software (see previous post) with the very dedicated help of customer care, the software is pretty usable as far as responsiveness goes. But these basic misses on what have been very fundamental features in these systems for over a decade now mystify me as well...

 

[digiboxer]

OK I found it....it was CraZ8 who's car traveled all over S Florida and a brief fling in Havana.

The are more EAs on the way to Alabama than Havana

 

[joec]

I was just coming to post a rant on some of this myself. I've had my Air GT for almost a week and I absolutely love it. It is an incredible driving machine. But some of these UI things mystify me as well as they just seem so fundamental and such a huge miss by a design team that seems to have thought about every single detail and come up with elegant and beautiful solutions to most of them.

I can't remember owning a car since the inception of "infotainment" systems that had absolutely no way to display the currently playing song anywhere other than on the actual media player screen. They ALL have that information somewhere all the time.

I don't completely buy the Android Automotive limitation either because they recently put turn by turn in that spot that otherwise shows the word "Air" all the time. As shown in those early promo pics, this space should be used for the current song.

And let's talk about the "Home" screen. This one makes me want to enter it in ESPN's "c'mon man...". Do the UX engineers really think that I'm so addled that the primary thing I will need to do each time I get in my car is have it tell me exactly how to find my own house or place of work? These are the things that should take up 50% of the home screen space? And then let's fill most of the rest of it with a Tidal display whether I'm using Tidal or not - oh, but if I do happen to be playing Tidal at the time, let's not show that, let's just keep it as a static display of the last several Tidal stations selected.

C'mon man...

As I said, I really love this car and, now that I finally got it up to date on software (see previous post) with the very dedicated help of customer care, the software is pretty usable as far as responsiveness goes. But these basic misses on what have been very fundamental features in these systems for over a decade now mystify me as well...

Extremely easy to judge this stuff when you have no idea what the constraints were in the room. Not knocking you; I have the same thoughts all the time when I use any piece of software. But then I try to remember the many times I was in the room, and I witnessed why decisions get made. And that helps me empathize a bit.

No matter how disappointed we are about this or that in the software, we can take comfort in the fact many Lucid executives are driving their Airs to work every day, thinking “C’mon, man” as well. I have no doubt many of our pet peeves are being worked on as we speak.

 

[Birdog]

We've had our Lucid Air just over a year now, and we're loving it more rather than less as time marches along. I still look for excuses to climb in for a drive.

However, there are some things that I assumed would be simple-to-implement UI improvements that would have come down the pike by now . . . but haven't:

1. Why can't a music selection be displayed when other screens are up? Why do you have to toggle between "Nav" and "Music" when you want to see the satellite maps and also want to know what music is playing? (Our Tesla displays the music selection in a small corner inset of the screen no matter what other display is up. It's easy to see while interfering with nothing else.)

2. Why is Homelink geofenced to bring up the garage door opening buttons when you approach your garage but is not geofenced to bring up the buttons when you leave the garage? Or even programmable to open a selected door automatically upon approach? (I've had other cars do this.)

Both are also major concerns of mine, but particularly the garage door issue. It is very irritating to the point that I carry my old garage door opener device with me.

 

[nevadagame]

Extremely easy to judge this stuff when you have no idea what the constraints were in the room. Not knocking you; I have the same thoughts all the time when I use any piece of software. But then I try to remember the many times I was in the room, and I witnessed why decisions get made. And that helps me empathize a bit.

No matter how disappointed we are about this or that in the software, we can take comfort in the fact many Lucid executives are driving their Airs to work every day, thinking “C’mon, man” as well. I have no doubt many of our pet peeves are being worked on as we speak.

 

[ebr]

Extremely easy to judge this stuff when you have no idea what the constraints were in the room. Not knocking you; I have the same thoughts all the time when I use any piece of software. But then I try to remember the many times I was in the room, and I witnessed why decisions get made. And that helps me empathize a bit.

No matter how disappointed we are about this or that in the software, we can take comfort in the fact many Lucid executives are driving their Airs to work every day, thinking “C’mon, man” as well. I have no doubt many of our pet peeves are being worked on as we speak.

Oh, I get it. I didn't mention this before but I have an over 30 year career in software development behind me so I know about limitations and the pesky expectations of users. I truly hope that all these things are simply due to some platform or other constraint that is currently being worked on - but I still think some of the decisions were a bit off the mark. Like featuring those two nav favorites as the primary Home screen content. That just doesn't really make much sense to me from a daily use standpoint.

I'm mystified not because I think the design team did a bad job or is inadequate - just the opposite. I've watched most of the videos they've produced about the design of this car and it is obvious that it is a talented and very dedicated team behind this stuff. That's why I'm mystified...

 

[nevadagame]

Oh, I get it. I didn't mention this before but I have an over 30 year career in software development behind me so I know about limitations and the pesky expectations of users. I truly hope that all these things are simply due to some platform or other constraint that is currently being worked on - but I still think some of the decisions were a bit off the mark. Like featuring those two nav favorites as the primary Home screen content. That just doesn't really make much sense to me from a daily use standpoint.

I'm mystified not because I think the design team did a bad job or is inadequate - just the opposite. I've watched most of the videos they've produced about the design of this car and it is obvious that it is a talented and very dedicated team behind this stuff. That's why I'm mystified...

Most often in my experience, when a great piece of hardware “misses the mark “ on software which I think is a very generous interpretation, is because the original budget allocated was grossly too small. Whom ever was in charge of putting together these initial budgets highly prioritized, engineering and hardware implementation, to the detriment of areas that were not in the founders vision as being important enough. Even though Lucid is playing catch-up now, and hopefully will succeed in updating to current reasonable standards, I believe the software team likely knew that this was not a polished product and we’re very frustrated by the constraints put on them to get it out quickly and without proper funding.

 

[joec]

Most often in my experience, when a great piece of hardware “misses the mark “ on software which I think is a very generous interpretation, is because the original budget allocated was grossly too small. Whom ever was in charge of putting together these initial budgets highly prioritized, engineering and hardware implementation, to the detriment of areas that were not in the founders vision as being important enough. Even though Lucid is playing catch-up now, and hopefully will succeed in updating to current reasonable standards, I believe the software team likely knew that this was not a polished product and we’re very frustrated by the constraints put on them to get it out quickly and without proper funding.

Yes. I definitely think timing and budget played a huge role. As @ebr mentioned, there are marketing pics out there where you can clearly see the currently playing track where the "Air" logo is now. In the 1.0 software, turn-by-turn directions did not appear there, while they do now in 2.0.

They had the idea to implement multiple features in that space, but ran out of time or money, clearly. This is what gives me hope they will eventually get to these finer points of the UI.

I still think they have bugs to fix before they do much more on the feature front. But again, we've all been in these situations where the pressure to keep pumping out the features superseded our desire to get the gremlins out. So I wouldn't be surprised to see a bit of both in the coming months and years.

 

[joec]

Oh, I get it. I didn't mention this before but I have an over 30 year career in software development behind me so I know about limitations and the pesky expectations of users. I truly hope that all these things are simply due to some platform or other constraint that is currently being worked on - but I still think some of the decisions were a bit off the mark. Like featuring those two nav favorites as the primary Home screen content. That just doesn't really make much sense to me from a daily use standpoint.

I'm mystified not because I think the design team did a bad job or is inadequate - just the opposite. I've watched most of the videos they've produced about the design of this car and it is obvious that it is a talented and very dedicated team behind this stuff. That's why I'm mystified...

I think the Home and Work thing was an attempt to copy the same feature Tesla has. One-button tap to go home is a good idea, but it doesn't need a screen unto itself. It's definitely not completely thought-through. Heck, in the nav you can't even set a list of favorites yet. You can just pick any location as one of those two slots. If you send a location to the car, it pops up on that list, but only until you select it. Then it disappears. There's no history of where you've navigated in the past.

Clearly tons of work still to do there.

My guess is the entire home screen will get a redesign once they have the time. I agree in practice it's a bit of a wasted screen. Similar to the Openings screen. With the exception of child locks and the sunshade, I can get to everything on the Openings screen somewhere else. I find myself basically never using that screen at all. Feels like the "car" screen could easily take over those few remaining non-redundant functions. And then you'd free up a tab for something else. Or just have fewer top tabs.

So many possibilities. I'm sure the designers are having a field day rethinking a lot of these things.

 

[Cosmo Cruz]

I"m just going to say that my car is having lunch at Denny's in Ruther Glen, VA right now.
I'm having a blast watching my car come home to me after visiting a swamp outside of Mechanicsville.
Really liking the mobile app. No need to get updates from the hauler....I can see where my car is in real time!

It occurs to me ... must be weird for the haulers / service people to have us turning on our cars at all hours from hundreds of miles away.
Were I a night shift security guard and the Lucids started flashing, flapping, and barking at 3 AM I'd shoot them.

 

[Negan1000]

I was just coming to post a rant on some of this myself. I've had my Air GT for almost a week and I absolutely love it. It is an incredible driving machine. But some of these UI things mystify me as well as they just seem so fundamental and such a huge miss by a design team that seems to have thought about every single detail and come up with elegant and beautiful solutions to most of them.

I can't remember owning a car since the inception of "infotainment" systems that had absolutely no way to display the currently playing song anywhere other than on the actual media player screen. They ALL have that information somewhere all the time.

I don't completely buy the Android Automotive limitation either because they recently put turn by turn in that spot that otherwise shows the word "Air" all the time. As shown in those early promo pics, this space should be used for the current song.

And let's talk about the "Home" screen. This one makes me want to enter it in ESPN's "c'mon man...". Do the UX engineers really think that I'm so addled that the primary thing I will need to do each time I get in my car is have it tell me exactly how to find my own house or place of work? These are the things that should take up 50% of the home screen space? And then let's fill most of the rest of it with a Tidal display whether I'm using Tidal or not - oh, but if I do happen to be playing Tidal at the time, let's not show that, let's just keep it as a static display of the last several Tidal stations selected.

C'mon man...

As I said, I really love this car and, now that I finally got it up to date on software (see previous post) with the very dedicated help of customer care, the software is pretty usable as far as responsiveness goes. But these basic misses on what have been very fundamental features in these systems for over a decade now mystify me as well...

The navigation turning commands are listed twice - right side of center cockpit screen and right side screen. One of them could use use to display the radio song information.

 

[Bobby]

The navigation turning commands are listed twice - right side of center cockpit screen and right side screen. One of them could use use to display the radio song information.

I actually like that. One for the driver and one for the passenger. That said, it would be nice it it were a user option as to what to display there.

 

[joec]

I actually like that. One for the driver and one for the passenger. That said, it would be nice it it were a user option as to what to display there.

The reason they appear twice is so the driver can still see the next turn, even if someone switches the right cockpit panel to audio, phone, home, etc.

It would be nice if when you switch the right cockpit to nav, the center right would show currently playing media, or something.

Or as Bobby suggests, just let the driver decide what to put up there.